“So much of Didion’s writing is about the formless nature of our lives and the inability of ‘thinking’ to get us anyplace new. The way the days accrue without any inherent purpose, how the possibility for cruelty simmers under our intimate relationships. The gap between our archetypes and reality, the dreamy songs of true love and white dresses juxtaposed with the black eye. … There are no good guys, no heroes, and whatever meaning we find is entirely self-imposed. What to write in the face of that chaos? If trying to think herself out of it didn’t work, what else for Didion to do than pin down the world as she saw it, follow the images that have that internal urgency, what she called a ‘shimmer’? How else to make sense of a world without any intrinsic narrative, no teleological release?” -Emma Cline, Joan Didion's Specific Vision
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